Hi folks:
There's a complicated story involving journalism and privacy in last week's Riverfront Times:
http://tinyurl.com/y8r6qqu
The gist is this: the "Social Media Editor" of the Post-Dispatch put out a query, and somebody replied in a way the editor thought was offensive. He traced the anonymous poster via his IP address, discovered that it was registered to a local school, and notified the school's headmaster. The person who had sent the post was fired.
Here's where it gets tricky. The employee had no expectation of privacy from his employer; that's been well-established. But what are his expectations of privacy when he replies to an online columnist? Is the columnist ethically justified in tracing an anonymous correspondent's location and notifying the person's employer? Can the person who was fired sue the columnist? I suspect we'll find out pretty soon.
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1 comment:
Wow. This was really interesting. From a moral perspective, I am all over the board regarding the ethical behavior of both parties. As far as legal issues go, the school employee did provide cause to be terminated. Employers frequently have web policies (there is no doubt the school did). What is really interesting is the fact that the domain name created by the third party employs the social media columnists' name. Does he have a right to that?
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